


recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers

by thingswithteeth



Series: perhaps the world ends here [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Apocalypse, Canon-Typical Violence, Cows, F/F, Friendship, Minor Character Death, Sad with a Happy Ending, episode 160, like they're bad at it but still: friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 16:41:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21395353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithteeth/pseuds/thingswithteeth
Summary: Three weeks before the world ends, Basira goes home.
Relationships: Background Georgie Barker/Melanie King - Relationship, Background Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood - Relationship, Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Series: perhaps the world ends here [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1542487
Comments: 24
Kudos: 187





	recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers

Basira’s flat feels haunted.

Honestly, after the year she’s had, the most surprising thing is that she doesn’t mean that literally.

She doesn’t bother to check the last few remaining slices of wholemeal bread before she sweeps the bag off the kitchen counter and into the bin; even if she couldn’t see the green-white blossoms of mold through the bag, she’s been gone far too long for anything not in a tin to be edible. The two cups in the sink had been rinsed clean before she had left, at least, and are mercifully free of life. There’s a pile of dirty laundry and a pile of clean laundry in the middle of her bedroom floor, because she’s tidy enough to rinse her plates but she’s never quite got out of the habit of slowly moving her clothes from one pile to the other over the course of the week. A stack of books borrowed-without-asking from the Institute sit precariously on the corner of the table. There’s a the fine patina of dust on everything and the air smells stale, evidence of a person – a _life_ – left in media res.

Hers isn’t the only ghost here. There’s an old leather jacket slung across the back of one of her kitchen chairs, brown nubuck so old that the elbows are creased nearly white and the mouton collar is worn shabby along the edges. The lining is in tatters and there’s a dark stain near one cuff that Basira’s pretty sure would have been logged into evidence had their former workmates ever decided to hold Daisy accountable for the things she had done. It is the most profoundly ugly jacket Basira has ever seen, and Daisy had—Daisy loves it. She’d asked after it, a week free from the coffin. Basira hadn’t thought that a trip to the flat had been worth the risk. She sort of wishes she’d risked it now.

(She’s sort of grateful she hadn’t; neither of them had been much for gift giving, and she thinks this might be the one thing she has that was Daisy’s. The collar smells the way the short hairs at the nape of Daisy’s neck had when they had worn each other out enough for tenderness and Basira had been able to press her face to skin and just breathe in, clean sweat and damp wool, pleasant mostly because it was familiar and—.)

She was right not to risk it. It wasn’t safe to be here. More than once, she’d considered giving up the lease. It’s probably not safe to be here now, but the Archives aren’t any safer, not anymore if they ever were, and even if they _are_ the good will she still has with some of her former colleagues isn’t going to stretch as far letting her spend her nights at an active crime scene.

The weight of her empty flat presses down on her, and for just a moment it’s worse than those months after the Unknowing, the dark tunnels and the constant threat of attack, the sharp knob of Melanie’s wrist against the palm of her hand the closest thing to comfort. Melanie’s gone now, and that’s—that’s the best thing to come out of this whole sorry mess, and Barisa refuses to be anything but happy about it. Martin and Jon are gone too, still or again depending on how she looks at it; it’s been a little over two hours since she put them on the train, and they’ll be halfway to Scotland by now.

No one left but herself to rely on.

That’s fine.

That’s _good_.

**

This is the third time DCI Hales has asked Basira to come in for—not an interview. Just to answer some questions. He hadn’t been sectioned when she was still police and she was police for too long not to know that a request for a friendly chat is rarely that, but she’s hungry for any information she can get.

He has a broad, cheerful face. She’s sure it’s served him well. “Anything else you can tell me?” he asks, as she stands and gathers her things.

Nothing that he wants to know, not really, Section 31 or not. “No, sir.”

He doesn’t look like he believes her; the face might be broad and cheerful but the eyes are shrewd and watchful. Basira’s been on the receiving end of Daisy’s undivided attention far too many times over the years to be unnerved by the likes of Hales. He might have a good nose, but he’s not actually on the hunt. After a moment he shrugs, and reaches around her to pull open the door. She expects she’ll be getting a fourth call from him any day.

Martin calls her later that day, when she’s standing on the pavement outside the takeaway place Daisy had always favored because it’s open late. She has a plastic bag with an order of lamb biryani and garlic naan looped around her wrist; the smell rising from it is late nights sprawled across her sofa and Daisy’s teeth against the tips of her fingers.

They’ve only spoken twice, if she doesn’t count that first brief call to let her know they arrived safely. He spends more time on the phone with her than he has to, and the small talk is awkward but she plays along because she thinks it’s as much for his benefit as it is for hers, and she’s a little startled by how pleased she is at the idea that he considers her a safe crutch for his first staggering steps away from the monster that had almost swallowed him whole. They’re not close, but there’d been a time, a short time, after the Unknowing but before Peter Lukas, when she thinks that they had understood each other as well as two people are likely to: alone, desperate, _wretched_, the last ones left standing.

“I saw a cow,” he says, apropos of nothing, and she’s so surprised by her own laugh that she chokes on it.

“I’m sure you’ve seen a _lot_ of cows.”

“It was a very good cow,” he says, and he sounds a little cross but he also sounds mostly like himself, and she—she finds she’s glad to hear it.

“Please promise me you’ll tell Jon about the _good cow_,” she says, because the face she can imagine Jon making at that is the best thing to live inside her head in weeks. Months.

“Basira,” he says, and she doesn’t know what to name his tone. Warm. Pleased. A little shy. “I tell Jon about all the good cows.”

And she’s happy for them. She really is. But she can’t pretend that happy for them is all she is.

She almost says something. _Don’t wait_. _Don’t take the time you have for granted. Don’t assume that second chances last_.

She doesn’t. It’s not the kind of thing they say to each other, and it’s not the kind of thing that either of them would be able to pretend is about him and Jon.

**

Basira looks for Daisy.

She circles the area around the flat Daisy had kept, although Daisy had never been there even before she had got herself lost in the Buried and her landlord has since rented the place to a new family. She’d always preferred Basira’s overstuffed sofa and Basira’s chipped charity shop plates and Basira’s bed. They’d never spent much time at Daisy’s place, in part because Daisy had one and a half usable mugs and a folding chair pulled up next to a radio in her lounge instead of a sofa and television. Basira had been sort of impressed by the flat the first time she had seen it – had thought it was a testament to Daisy’s commitment to the job and had been young enough to think being _that_ committed to the job was a good thing – but it still hadn’t been a very conformable place to spend any amount of time.

She isn’t really surprised to find no signs of Daisy. There’d be nothing to draw her back here even before the she had taken that last step into the Hunt, and less now, when nothing about that barren flat will sing to her of blood. She spends an afternoon and an evening lurking outside the station Daisy had worked out of most often although, much like her flat, she had never spent much time here, always out chasing the next lead (chasing more than that). She checks the bar where Daisy had met with her favorite CI, the coffee shop near the Archives she’d liked, the tube station where Basira had once talked her down from slamming a suspect’s face into the dingy black tactile tape near the platform’s edge a _second_ time.

Eventually, she knows she’ll have to spend a day ankle deep in dead leaves in Epping Forest. She’s far past pretending she doesn’t know where Daisy’s favorite hunting grounds are, where the bodies are buried.

She keeps half an eye on the Guardian, the Times, the evening news, waiting for—something suitably brutal, she supposes. There’s nothing, other than continued coverage of what had happened at the Magnus Institute. They’re calling it a terror attack now. When she sees that, she puts her forehead down against her kitchen table and laughs until it hurts. Until it _hurts_.

She looks for Daisy.

She doesn’t look very hard.

Basira made a promise, and she has never broken a single promise she’s ever made to Daisy Tonner. That doesn’t mean she wants to keep this one.

**

No one knows where Elias is.

Occasionally Basira feels the prickle of watching eyes against the back of her neck and between her shoulder blades. Most of the time she can explain it away: the old woman watching her with pinched lips while she selects frozen ready meals at Tesco, the young man who makes deliberate, smiling eye contact when Barisa turns and finds him looking.

Most of the time.

**

“I think he’s getting a little—snacky,” Martin says during their next call, and she can hear the hesitation in his voice.

Basira is just surprised that it’s taken this long. She supposes that Peter Lukas had been the equivalent of a twenty course meal. Maybe Jon had walked away from that encounter feeling like she does any time she lets her mum feed her: almost too stuffed to stand and not even wanting to look at food for a week. (She hasn’t called home for a while. She supposes that she should, but her family doesn’t even know enough about her life now for her to have received the panicked calls she had half expected after the Magnus Institute had reached the headlines; it had taken her two days to realize that she had been dodging questions about her new workplace hard enough that even if her mum had seen the news, she probably didn’t recognize the name. Now—she had brought Daisy around for iftar once, and somehow, in spite of Daisy being, well, _Daisy_, everyone had been very charmed. Her mum will ask, because she always does, and Basira won’t know what answer to give.)

“I can’t go into the Archives yet,” Basira says. “I’ll send whatever I can, when I can.”

It’s an easy promise to make, the easiest one Basira has made in weeks.

Another brief hesitation, one she can practically _feel_ though the shoddy connection. For a moment she can almost imagine him, crammed into an old-fashioned phone booth so tight that his elbows brush the glass, nothing around him but low stone walls and rolling green hills and sheep and _good cows_ for as far as the eye can see. “Any word on—Jon’s been asking.”

Her throat clicks when she swallows. “Call me next week,” she says. “I’ll let you know if I’ve been able to get at the statements.”

**

Basira imagines she can see Martin, crammed into an old-fashioned phone booth so tight that his elbows brush the glass, nothing around him but low stone walls and rolling green hills and sheep and _good cows_ for as far as the eye can see. She imagines she can see Jon, care-worn and too-thin but smiling, thin autumn light turning his complexion gray and a blanket that looks like something that Daisy would own mostly because it’s worn to holes and so hideous that it probably should’ve gone in the bin even before the holes had appeared wrapped around his shoulders.

It’s mostly not them she imagines, though.

At night, she dreams of rain-damp pavement beneath her feet and the throat of some stretched and hideous parody of a person between her teeth. (Distantly, she knows that it has fought every time she has caught it, that this is why her left arm hangs aching and useless by her side, that it has looked different every time she has caught it but that the scent is the same, plastic and cloying sugar-sweetness like candy floss on a hot night, that she has let it go at least once before to prolong the chase before remembering her purpose, or at least remembering that she _has_ a purpose beyond the sluggish drumbeat of blood pumping through the creature’s veins).

Her eye teeth have always been sharp, ever since she was a child. They’re sharper now, but not by much. They certainly shouldn’t be able to rend flesh so easily, but she has no trouble. The hot rush of blood across her tongue isn’t quite right (she’s tasted blood before), the coppery tang cut by something familiar-but-not that she can’t quite place and that makes the blood curdle in her belly with unease. It fights her. Even bleeding out on the already damp pavement it fights, raking her skin with long, sharp fingers.

It’s in pieces by the time it stops fighting her. What is left is somewhere between flesh and disassembled mannequin, limbs twisted apart in a strange parody of the inhuman form.

The dreams are disquieting but easy to ignore. She wakes up sweating, makes herself a cup of tea, and doesn’t go back to sleep, which would be more of an inconvenience if her days weren’t so much her own right now, occasional calls from DCI Hales and Martin aside. Basira can ignore bad dreams. She _does_ ignore them, right until she dreams of the pink and shining face of a familiar old man glaring up at her in the moment before she drags her nails (claws) across his eyes, his gun lying just out of reach of his scrambling fingertips. She blinks and finds the girl on the till staring back at her, expectant and impatient with less than ten minutes on the clock until closing. Basira takes her change and her toothpaste and leaves.

Harder to ignore if she can’t pretend they’re just dreams.

She’d recognized a Starbucks in her – _Daisy’s_ – peripheral vision and caught a glimpse of a familiar cross-street. She has all the clues she needs to figure out where Daisy is hunting tonight and go there. Her gun hangs heavy under her arm; she hasn’t left her flat without it since the attack on the Archives.

_Detective_, Elias, or, _shit_, Jonah, had called her. _Detective_ rolling off his tongue like a taunt or—or a promise. She wonders if she’ll _know _where to find Daisy, if she tries hard enough, if the picture will pop clean and sharp into her skull, awful knowledge rather than the breadcrumbs that Elias had given her, the scattered clues that come in her dreams, waking and sleeping.

Briefly, she wishes that there was a way to reach Jon, that he was the one slogging down to the telephone box to call her ever week, that she could ask him how it had started, what it had been like, if there had ever been a moment, a _single_ moment, when he could’ve stopped becoming what he is before he began. Had the signposts been clearly marked, or had he just turned a right instead of left, taken directions from the wrong man, and found himself walking down a short road to monster?

Pointless. Even if she could talk to Jon, she knows she wouldn’t ask.

Maybe she wouldn’t have to. Maybe he would just—know. Maybe, this time, that wouldn’t be so bad. He could pluck the information from her head if it meant her getting a clear answer for once.

Maybe if she tries, she’ll be able to find the answer to another question, pluck it from thin air or just follow the clues. She’d been good at that, once.

_Where is Daisy?_

She doesn’t try. She’s never broken a promise to Daisy. She won’t. But she—not yet. She doesn’t have to keep it yet.

It’s hypocrisy. Jon had told her that, more or less.

He was probably right.

**

Basira had gone to see Melanie once, after Melanie had found her way out of the Archives. She remembers not wanting to take the time. She remembers feeling like she didn’t have any choice; Melanie had been all she had for months, the _only _one, and she had known that she owed Melanie better than a disappearing act. Or maybe not. Maybe the kindest thing any of them could’ve done for Melanie was to disappear.

Melanie’s girlfriend had certainly seemed to think so. She had stood on the doorstep, a head shorter than Basira and without years of police training under her belt, and she had looked unshakable and immovable for the thirty seconds it had taken her to notice the slightly crumpled bouquet of alstroemeria in Basira’s hand. She still hadn’t seemed happy about letting Basira in.

Georgie is all right.

“They’re safe for cats,” Basira had said, because the orange fur on Melanie’s unfailingly black wardrobe had been how Basira had figured out the girlfriend angle in the first place, and it was better than having to reconcile with the fact that she was bringing scentless flowers to a newly blind woman. Georgie—hadn’t thawed, exactly, but she had started to look a little less like she was going to remove Basira from her home by force of will alone.

Now Basira has no reason to feel impatient about having to take time out of her day to visit Melanie because she has nothing _but_ the achingly slow progression of time while she waits: for Martin’s calls, for the Archives to be opened back up, for Daisy, for the other shoe to drop.

Georgie doesn’t look quite so angry to see her on the threshold this time, at least, in spite of the absence of flowers. She even goes to make them all tea, like she doesn’t mind Basira staying long enough for a cup, leaving Basira alone in the cozy living room with Melanie and an _enormous_ orange cat who seems determined to be Basira’s new best friend, as though he can sense that she’s allergic. Cats are contrary that way, she supposes. She strokes a cautious hand down his spine, because if she’s going to end up in hives later anyway she might as well earn them. He writhes beneath her fingers and grinds his paws against her thigh in a purring, uncomfortable, joyous rhythm, his claws pricking at her skin through the leg of her trousers.

“You’re well, then?” she asks.

Melanie snorts, and Basira is reminded of Martin, because Melanie—Melanie sounds like herself, like a her that Basira can barely remember, nights out and gossip and making the best of a bad situation, before the rage and the fear and Elias Magnus Bouchard Jonah fucking _whatever_ had got his filthy fingers inside her brain. “You can’t have come here just to ask me that.”

_ Don’t wait_. _Don’t take the time you have for granted. Don’t assume that second chances last_.

She almost says it, to Melanie, the way she hadn’t even come close with Martin. She thinks Melanie might’ve liked her well enough to be sympathetic, even if she doesn’t understand, even if in the end all they’d had was the friendship born of desperation and a bad hand.

She doesn’t say anything.

Melanie smiles, a wry twist of the lips that still manages to look soft, at home in this cozy living room with her ferocious girlfriend and her gargantuan cat. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I’m good. I mean, I’m not—I’m as good as I’m going to be, for right now. And eventually I’ll be better. Hopefully.” She makes another faint noise. “Assuming Jon doesn’t, like, end the world or something.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Basira says, “but I don’t think that Jon is the one we should be worrying about.” Melanie tilts her head, and Basira starts to shrug before she remembers that there’s no point. “He’s in Scotland. With Martin.” As if the world couldn’t be ended from Scotland, as if a five hour train ride means safety, but out of sight is out of mind, and she finds herself lulled for minutes or hours at a time by the distance and the reassurance that they’re—as good as they’re going to be, that maybe eventually they’ll be better, hopefully.

“Oh. _Oh_.” Melanie is quiet for a moment, and when she exhales it comes out shaky. “No one told me.”

For a moment Basira wonders why Melanie would be interested in the state of Jon’s love life before she realizes what had actually been meant. “Sorry. I guess we figured that you didn’t want to know.”

“I don’t, but,” she shakes her head. “He came bursting in here, Basira, like something was on his heels. I couldn’t—I didn’t want to,” she stops herself and sighs. “He’s a _shit_ friend sometimes, you know? But he is that. I guess. I want to know that he’s okay. I want to know that you’re _all_ okay.”

Basira is silent.

“_Are _you okay?”

She asks it like she knows the answer. No real point in answering, in that case.

“_We’ll be fine_,” Melanie mutters, and Basira is uncertain if she was meant to hear but Jon’s voice is distinctive enough and Melanie’s mimicry too spot on for her to miss. “Christ. What a liar.”

She reaches out a hand and then starts to pull back almost immediately, as though she’s suddenly remembered that this isn’t something they do. Basira doesn’t really want to take that offered hand, but she still owes Melanie better than a disappearing act. She wraps her fingers around Melanie’s forearm instead of her fingers, and finds some small comfort in the familiarity of the knob of Melanie’s wrist against her palm for the briefest of moments before she clears her throat awkwardly and lets go.

“We’re always fine,” Basira says.

Melanie shakes her head. “You’re a liar, too.”

**

“I lost three people in the tunnels,” Hales says, “for over a day.” He rubs at his eyes. He doesn’t look so plump and cheerful anymore. Mostly, he looks tired. Basira knows the feeling.

“Easy to get turned around down there,” she says.

He frowns at her before he remembers himself and forces his expression back to bland. “You ought to hear the things they were saying, once we fished them out. Wild stuff, all of it.”

“They’re sectioned. I’m sure it’s not the only wild stuff they’ve seen.”

“Some days,” he says, “I feel like we should just burn the whole place to the ground.”

He’s watching her, testing. She’s not sure for what. Some days, she agrees with him. She meets his gaze levelly. “Sure,” she says. “Not sure we’d like to see what comes crawling out once that’s done, though.”

For a moment, he looks like he wants to argue, but only for a moment. She watches it go out of him like a gust of air. He stops rubbing his eyes, but only so he can scrub at his whole face with his palm. “You’re not wrong,” he says, and leaves it at that. Basira can’t much bring herself to savor the victory, mostly because she isn’t sure it is one.

**

Often her dreams are just dreams, or maybe not dreams, because that word seems inadequate and inaccurate as a way to describe the potent jumble of memory and nightmare that leaves her as sweat-damp and wakeful as whatever it is that the Beholding and Elias Bouchard have done to her.

Sometimes it’s the giddy whirl of the Unknowing. She doesn’t remember much of it, but she does remember how it feels to be so cast adrift from herself that she’s unsure of what self _is_, nothing but skin that is maybe-hers-and-maybe-isn’t, if there is skin at all, flesh and bone just a hypothetical and everything else she is a tunnel that the wind can whistle through, nothing substantial enough about her to break against. She tries not to think about it much, because when she does it gets hard to breathe, something jagged sharp caught in her throat and in her chest. Sometimes it’s the darkness of the tunnels beneath the Institute, a swelling wave of flesh shaped something like a person if she turns her head or crosses her eyes to look at it just right, like those books of optical illusions she had read as a kid, the only thing substantial enough to stand beside Melanie’s slight form, barred teeth and knife flashing bright.

Those nightmares are old. These days it’s mostly screaming and gunshots, eyes gone feral and a voice she barely recognizes at all growling at her to run.

It hadn’t been the first time that Daisy’s voice had struck some strange, unrecognizable chord in her. _Hi_, she had said, soft, and Basira had been glad to see her, of course she had, but in so many ways the person who had crawled out of that coffin hadn’t been Daisy. Not _her_ Daisy, because her voice hadn’t been the only thing that was different and soft, and every time Basira had looked at her it had been like looking at someone who had chosen to peel their own skin off to reveal everything bleeding and raw beneath.

Daisy had been solid. She had been a fixed point. She had come back shaky, and Basira hadn’t—it’s awful to consider now, but Basira hadn’t known how to forgive Daisy for that. She had needed something she could count on, and she had ended up with another obligation in a rapidly growing list.

It had taken her a long time to realize that nothing had been lost that Daisy missed, and that the pieces of her which had been returned, they had been—they hadn’t been the Daisy who could solve any problem just by throwing herself against it and clawing hard enough, but they had been slow Sunday mornings and the takeaway dinners, Daisy showing up at her mother’s flat in long sleeves and trying hard to dull all her sharp edges because she had known that it mattered, not teeth against Basira’s throat maybe but the playful scrape of them against her fingertips. It had taken her a long time to realize that was enough, that she wouldn’t trade less to worry about for less of Daisy.

It had taken her too long.

_Don’t assume that second chances last_, she had almost told Martin, had almost told Melanie. _Don’t wait_.

Daisy had tried to kiss her once after she had come out of that coffin. Her mouth had been gentle on Basira’s, and she had tasted like longing and like words they’d never been very good at saying to each other. Basira hadn’t known what to do with that. She’d kind of figured that she could sort it out later, once they were out of the thick of it, once she wasn’t keeping one eye on Jon and the other on Elias and trying to prevent the wide terrible world from banging down their front door at the same time.

_Don’t take the time you have for granted. _

**

The police finally let her back into the Archives.

There’s a smear of something black just inside the doors of the Institute, and Basira doesn’t have to wonder what it is. She’s never had a weak stomach, but she feels it twist uncomfortably as she walks through the empty halls of the building where she had been trapped for so long, footsteps echoing and signs of carnage on every side. No one has cleaned up yet, and there’s still a scattering of yellow evidence markers around the room and a half-eaten sandwich mouldering on an abandoned desk. Basira spends an idle moment wondering if it’s a researcher’s discarded lunch or just proof of a sloppy crime scene team before going down into the Archives.

She finds an empty banker’s box and starts to fill it. She doesn’t know what Jon has read and what he hasn’t, so she stays away from the cases that already have an audio recording, figuring those have a better chance of having already been—thoroughly chewed over. By the time she’s done, there’s a sizable stack in the box. She goes to put on the lid, and finds her hand hovering over a folder sitting on the edge of what had once been Tim’s desk and had sort of become anyone-who-needs-it’s desk (like Sasha’s, never like Martin’s in those last few months, mostly because they’d all sort of figured that Jon might have some kind of meltdown if they gave any indication that they didn’t think he was coming back). She expects it to be a recent statement, but the case number is 9920908. Follow-up, maybe, or pulled because a recent statement seemed related. She’ll admit she hadn’t been very good at keeping up with the actual work of the Archives, toward the end.

She flips open the folder. _Statement of Hazel Rutter._

With a shrug, she tosses it into the box.

One more statement can’t hurt, right?

**

“You know what I keep wondering?” Hales asks her, during what she really hopes will be her last conversation with him.

She doesn’t. She also doesn’t really care. They’ve let her back into the Archives, which is what she wanted. The only other thing she wants is for Hales to stop wasting her time and to let her go home to her empty flat.

“I keep wondering,” he says, “how you made it out of there. By the time we got to the Magnus Institute, there was no sign of anyone else around, not this Trevor Herbert – who’s been dead since 2010, by the way – nor Julia Montauk. Robert Montauk’s kid, of all people. Just you, with two expended clips and a farfetched story, and a lot of confused and traumatized people who don’t seem to have any real idea what happened.”

Her tongue feels dry in her mouth.

“You were police, Hussain. You have to know how it looks.”

“Looking for a scapegoat, are they?” she asks. She’s not sure why she’s cold with shock, why this feels like a betrayal. She shouldn’t be and it shouldn’t have been. If she’d been thinking, she’d have known all along that this was where her little talks with DCI Hales were going. Maybe they’ll give her Elias’ old cell. That would be kind of hilarious, in a terrible way.

Hales looks a little sorry, at least. She kind of wants to hit him for it. “You know how the higher-ups are, especially when it comes to anything that’ll get someone sectioned, but the public wants answers. If you’ve got any business outstanding, I’d suggest you wrap it up quickly.”

**

This isn’t a love story. Basira knows that.

The gun sits on her kitchen table, cold and still.

They were never very good at saying the words, and Basira doesn’t know how to make a bullet sound like love.

Maybe it is a love story. She hears that some of the best ones are tragedies.

**

She’s most of the way home when the sky cracks open like an egg, only instead of yolk what comes dripping out to replace the faint glow of the moon through the cloud cover is an eye, wide and waiting and _watching_.

She can _feel _it looking at her, through her. The wind picks up, howling along the twisting canyons formed by the buildings of London like something gone mourning, or come hunting. Lights flick off up and down the street, and she’s too aware of the darkness around her, the things that might be waiting for her there. She thinks of Callum Brodie for the first time in ages, shadows flowing up his small body like clinging fog, and can’t quite help the way that her hands have started to shake. For a moment, she freezes, fear like ice water in her blood.

Then the screaming starts.

Basira has always been good in a crisis. Basira had, as corny and naïve as it sounds now, become police because she had wanted to _help_. The Unknowing had given her nightmares and dead friends and stolen Daisy from her the first go around, but it had also taught her what she’s made of, that she can get past _anything_ if she just puts her head down and focuses on finding a way through.

This doesn’t feel like the Unknowing. This feels—worse.

It’s not a helpful thought, so she ignores it. She turns on her phone torch, and also ignores the way that her eyes prickle with relief when it works. She digs her short fingernails into the palms of her hands until she stops them shaking, buries the sick churning of her stomach beneath the pain of her own nails drawing blood and her determination to move forward, and goes toward the screaming.

There’s a young father ahead, eyes saucer wide and jacket hanging half off his shoulders in the driving wind. He seems mostly mindless with terror, shoving the wheels of his pram against the edge of the pavement without lifting them and heedless of the way his toddler’s screaming intensifies every time the wheels lurch against the kerb. It hasn’t seemed to occur to him that he could remove child from pram, but it also hasn’t seemed to occur to him that he could abandon both and run, for which Basira is grateful. 

Basira shoulders him aside and he doesn’t even fight her, just watches numbly as she tips the pram far enough to get the wheels up and over the lip of the pavement. She bullies him and his cargo in through the door of a nearby restaurant, hollers at the woman crouched behind the menu stand until she creeps out on hands and knees to lock the door on Basira’s heels. Basira isn’t sure that inside is much safer than outside now, but it’s got to be better than standing in the street.

She keeps going. She keeps going until the battery on her phone slides down toward twenty percent and she starts to feel a fine tremor spreading out from her hands and into the rest of her, not exhaustion but the slow grind of fear rubbing against her earlier determination until it starts to wear away, and then she keeps going for a while after that. The streets are emptier now, at least of people who aren’t past help (some of them are so far past being helped), and for a moment she breathes deep and finds herself wondering if she’s the last person in this vast city, maybe the last person in the world, and that’s not—there are other people, she _knows_ there are other people around her, crowded into the surrounding buildings, clinging to the illusion of safety provided by walls and locked doors, but for just a moment she doesn’t _feel_ it.

Her phone beeps faintly, warning her that her battery has dipped below fifteen percent. If she doesn’t go home soon, she won’t have the light to make it there, and she thinks – she knows – that it would be very bad for her to be caught in the dark alone.

She feels like she’s being followed the whole way home. She ignores it the same way she ignores the creeping worry that she’s the last woman left in the world, the way the shadows seem to press in on the light of her phone torch, eating away at the edges of it, the prickle between her shoulder blades of the unfeeling sky watching her progression. It’s not until she walks into the lobby of her building and someone catches the door behind her that she realizes that she should’ve been more careful, shouldn’t have dismissed the possibility of an actual physical threat just because the sky has split and the dark is pressing closer.

The lights are out in the lobby, just as they had been on the street, and her phone is swatted out of her grasp as she turns. It clatters against the floor, and the thin white beam of the torch does more to blind her than it does to illuminate the person behind her, but she sees enough: close-cropped hair, a lean frame, lips pulled into something that might be a smile and might be a snarl.

Julia Montauk.

Basira doesn’t remember reaching for her gun, but it’s in her hand. Montauk looks at it, and she laughs. She reaches out and grabs Basira’s wrist, but she doesn’t try to take the gun, just moves it until the muzzle is resting against her chest. “Go ahead and take your shot. Then I can take mine.” Her voice sounds off, like there’s something wrong with the shape of her jaw, and there’s blood caked beneath her nails. Clearly Montauk has given up all pretense of being something that hunts monsters, and not one herself. “Your little lapdog killed my partner.” She tuts softly, like this is nothing but a minor inconvenience, but even in the uncertain light Basira can see the rage in her eyes and feel it in the way her fingers spasm around Basira’s wrist. “We spent weeks watching your Archives, the old man and me. I know what you are to her. Thought I could return the favor. So take your shot. You get _one_.” She leans forward, close enough for them to be breathing the same air. Her breath smells like raw meat. “I should warn you, though. Bullets don’t hurt the way they used—.”

The gunshot is very loud in the enclosed space of the lobby. Montauk actually looks a bit startled, like she hadn’t expected it, or like she had expected Basira to wait until she was done talking. Bullets might not hurt like they used to, but the force of taking one to the chest is enough to send Montauk staggering back a few paces. It’s enough to buy Basira some time and a little bit of space, even if she’s not yet sure what she’s planning to do with either.

She doesn’t get a chance to figure it out. Something looms out of the dark behind Montauk, one more shadow barely distinguished from the deeper shadows of the street outside. A hand wraps around Montauk’s neck and drags her back into the night.

There’s a snarling from outside, punctuated once by a bitten off scream and a sound like fabric tearing. Basira can’t see what’s going on; even if she were to pick up her phone, the light wouldn’t penetrate that far. She knows that she should close the door, maybe go upstairs and barricade herself inside her flat, set herself up somewhere defensible before she has to confront whichever monster comes out on top. Instead she stands there, gun raised and pointed at nothing but the dark square of the open door.

The fight seems to last for a very long time. She’s pretty sure that it doesn’t, that only a few minutes have passed before everything goes silent save for the wail of the wind and the quiet rasp of her own breathing in her ears.

Footsteps. Panting, close enough now that she can hear it over the wind. Then—.

_Daisy_.

She’s unsteady on her feet, swaying with every step until she gets close enough to brace herself against the doorframe. She’s not dressed for the weather; Basira can see her chest rising and falling beneath the thin cotton of her t-shirt, big gulping breaths like she’s just run a mile, except Basira’s _been_ for a run with Daisy and Daisy doesn’t even break a sweat for a mile. She doesn’t look as thin as she had been those last days at the Archives, and Basira supposes that makes sense. She’s been hunting for weeks now. There’s blood on her face and down her front, some of it dried almost black and some of it wet and new, and Basira thinks it unlikely that none of the blood belongs to Daisy given the way she’s standing and the deep scoring across her clavicle, like someone had dragged nails or claws across her skin.

When she stops in the doorway her eyes catch and reflect the light, a bright burning red like the fat blue-eyed Himalayan that Basira’s dad had doted on until it became clear that his youngest was allergic. He’d cried the day they’d taken that cat to live with some family friends, she remembers suddenly. It was one of the only times that she’d ever seen him cry, face half-hidden in his sleeve so that she wouldn’t see and feel guilty. Her dad had never been much for crying. _Accept it and adapt, or fight and change it_. She wonders if there’s a reason she’s thinking about that now, when she feels—frozen, gun still raised, poised on the edge of a decision that probably ends poorly for her either way.

“Basira,” Daisy says, and then, “Hi.”

Her eyes are feral and there’s blood on her face, but she sounds like her, not the wet growl of the last time Basira had seen her, not even the way she had sounded when Basira had first decided that she loved her, focused and hardnosed and always half a second away from something ungentle. She sounds like the her that had come out of the coffin. Soft. Tired. A little afraid, under the tattered remains of all her old stubbornness.

It’s not a voice Basira thought she’d hear again. She—she wouldn’t trade it for anything.

She’s shaking a little, she realizes. That’s probably dangerous with a loaded gun in her hand, so she slides the safety into place and lets her arm drop to her side. Daisy pushes away from the door and comes toward her, one step and then two before her legs go out from under her. She lands hard on her knees, and Basira has one brief moment of indecision before she drops the gun and closes the distance. She reaches out to steady Daisy but it turns into something more desperate without her meaning for it to, one hand closing hard – too hard – on Daisy’s shoulder and the other knotting in her hair, matted and damp with sweat and probably worse.

Daisy leans forward, until her forehead presses against Basira's belly through her shirt. They’re close enough, touching in enough places, for Basira to feel the shudder that goes through Daisy’s body, starting in her shoulders and working its way down through her heels. After a few seconds Daisy’s hands settle tentatively at her hips, holding on to her, holding them together.

The wind is still howling outside. Basira thinks that she should probably go close the door. Not to keep the darkness out, that’s pointless, but to keep the warmth in.

She doesn’t move.

“Why did you come?” she asks, eventually.

Daisy laughs, choked-off and hoarse. Basira can feel the heat of it through her shirt. She can feel her own heart, lodged painfully at the base of her throat but not with fear, or at least not the kind of fear she had felt on the street or facing down Julia Montauk. This is the fear that comes with wanting, and with thinking, just for a moment, that she might be able to have.

“The world is ending. The world just _ended_,” Daisy says. She’s still clinging to Basira’s hips like someone drowning gripping at the shore, but she’s gone still and solid beneath Basira’s hands, a fixed point. “There’s no place I’d rather be.”

**Author's Note:**

> Story and series title from Joy Harjo's "Perhaps the World Ends Here."
> 
> Find me on [Tumblr](https://things-with-teeth.tumblr.com/).


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